'Vanquish' (Xbox 360)

For game that's quite brief, Vanquish is a surprisingly slow burn. Cutscenes with cringe-worthy dialog and one dimensional characters regularly interrupt its opening few hours, and cheap deaths lurk around every corner, whether it's from a surprise laser attack or spaceships that regularly drop out of the sky. Poorly checkpointed bosses add to the frustration, especially when you're seemingly doing everything you're supposed to in a shooter; hide behind cover, duck out when it's safe, fire a few shots and repeat ad nauseam.

You soon realize that Vanquish isn't just another cover-based shooter. It's once you learn that the convenient chest-high walls won't always save you from a barrage of homing rockets or a falling skyscraper that things start to fall into place. The ability to zip around the environment on your knees at impressive speed makes towering robots far less imposing, allowing you to skirt around them for concentrated attacks or easily flee from incoming projectiles. It's a blisteringly fast action game played with traditional over-the-shoulder shooting mechanics, and the combination works wonderfully.

Its story is also an interesting blend, combining the odd-ball antagonists of Japanese games with the female combat support and crass soldiers that appear so often in western shooters. Despite the lead basically being a space-bound Solid Snake with heavy smoking habit in tow, Sam Gideon is surprisingly endearing, as is the game's Halo-esque setting, a circular outer-space colony with buildings that curve up its vast walls. A lot of the game's plot elements verge on being generic but hold a lot of appeal, and visually the game is slick, polished, and never drops a beat despite regular encounters with screen-filling enemies.

One of the more interesting mechanics is to slow the action down to a crawl, allowing you to fire off a quick sniper round in the middle of a busy battlefield or clear a group of enemies within seconds. Not only can this be activated manually, but it acts as an defense mechanism that triggers when your suit is on the verge of overheating, giving you the chance to dodge oncoming bullets on the way to a cover point. The fact that a single gauge governs this ability along with knee sliding, melee attacks and health ensures it's used conservatively, and when it's performed as a last-ditch effort to finish off a troublesome boss or to make a desperate escape, there's always a great deal of risk and reward in doing so.

As a result, combat becomes exciting whether you're fighting the medial drones littering each stage or the game's more gargantuan enemies. Other touches such as weapon upgrades add a dose of light RPG-style engagement, while rushing across a battlefield to heal teammates amongst heavy fire provides an instant buzz. There's also a terrific sense of pace to the campaign, with inventive mid-level bosses and stages set on high-speed trains, lifts and conveyor belts that that do a great job of providing new takes on the game's combat. It's highly reminiscent of memorable Japanese action games such as Gunstar Heroes which were highly volatile, ever-changing and constantly engaging.

Although it offers a challenge mode, hidden items and additional difficulty settings, there's no escaping the fact that it's a single-player title with a six-hour campaign. Despite taking a short while to warm up, your time with Vanquish feels complete and incredibly satisfying, and one well worth looking into at a cheaper price point that can better justify its short but very welcome stay.